Great: 9.0

Rating: 9/10 (27 July 2019)

Whenever Guillermo Del Toro directs a film, chances are that it will be noticed. In the past, he was best known for his pair of Hellboy movies and the masterful Pan's Labyrinth. However, the former were kind of like buddy cop movies crossed with Lord of the Rings, while the latter was an intimate, character driven fantasy and coming-of-age film. In his entire career, Del Toro has never made anything like this. The premise is simple: gargantuan, extradimensional monsters are laying waste to the world's coastal population centers. To fight back, humanity creates equally large robots to push the beasts back. It really doesn't get much more basic than than that. Clearly, this is not a film meant to be analyzed or possess some deeper meaning. All it is - and all it delivers - are old-school thrills meant to fulfill a 12-year-old's greatest fantasy. As such, the characters are strictly one-dimensional, caricatures copied and pasted from a thousand other movies. While some may find this off-putting, keep in mind that the characters are not the focus of the film. That position belongs to the robots, monsters, and scenes involving robots fighting monsters. And to that end, this film is an unqualified success.